Eagle Ford Shale turns water into gold as need outstrips supply

Drilling is draining on drought-stricken area

A widely cited University of Texas at Austin study, funded by the oil and gas industry, had predicted hydraulic fracturing in the Eagle Ford would use a maximum of around 35,000 acre-feet of water annually.

Associated Press photos
Water retention ponds sit behind a gas flare, also known as a flare stack, at the Eagle Ford Shale region near Karnes City. BELOW: A University of Texas at Austin study, funded by the oil and gas industry, had predicted hydraulic fracturing in the Eagle Ford would use a maximum of around 35,000 acre-feet of water annually. Operators reported using about 43,770 acre-feet last year.

In the heart of South Texas, where the muted grayish green of live oak and the slender leaves of the thorny mesquite dominate a landscape burdened by drought, hydraulic fracturing used more than 14 billion gallons of water last year.

The number far outpaces estimates of what water use in the Eagle Ford Shale might have peaked at some time in the next decade, and represents one more way in which the meteoric development of the oil field has blown past expectations.

A widely cited University of Texas at Austin study, funded by the oil and gas industry, had predicted hydraulic fracturing in the Eagle Ford would use a maximum of about 35,000 acre-feet of water annually.

But the San Antonio Express-News looked at more than 23,000 Texas wells drilled from 2011 to 2013, including more than 6,100 in the Eagle Ford, and found that the oil field already is swallowing more water.

Operators reported using about 43,770 acre-feet last year in 3,522 Eagle Ford wells, the approximate annual usage for 153,000 San Antonio households.

“The oil and gas boom is requiring more water than we have,” said Hugh Fitzsimons, a Dimmit County rancher and a director of the Wintergarden Groundwater Conservation District. “Period.”

Water always has been needed for oil and gas drilling, but not in this quantity. The relatively new ability to combine horizontal drilling with hydraulic fracturing has made it possible to drill in tight rock such as shale, which stores oil and gas but doesn’t let go of them easily.

Hydraulic fracturing pumps a mix of water and chemicals at high pressure to break the shale. Then sand is added to the fluid in increasing amounts to hold open the fissures, letting oil and gas flow up the well to the surface.

Cleaning and recycling water so it can be used in multiple wells is on the rise in the region, but it’s not standard practice.

Some portion of those 14 billion Eagle Ford gallons used for fracturing — likely about 21 percent, according to the UT study — would have come from nonfreshwater sources: brackish aquifers that can’t be used for drinking, agriculture or livestock, or water that was recycled.

Fracturing each Eagle Ford well took about 3.8 million gallons of water this year, down from 4 million gallons in 2012.

But eight dozen wells used more than 10 million gallons of water — enough in each well to fill 15 Olympic-size swimming pools.

Water, though, is a complex issue.

Irrigation takes the lion’s share of the state’s water — about 61 percent of the state’s water demand, according to the Texas Water Development Board.

By comparison, water use for mining operations, including hydraulic fracturing, is a small slice of the state’s water use — about 1 percent, less than is used to keep yards green.

“A study released earlier this year showed that Texans use about 18 times as much fresh water watering their lawns as the highest estimates of the volumes of water used by the oil and gas industry in the state,” industry spokesman David Blackmon said.

And there are riches in selling fresh water.

“Water for sale” signs are commonplace in South Texas, along with reports of landowners who have become millionaires not from owning mineral rights, but from selling access to their water wells. A common provision in South Texas oil and gas leases requires that operators purchase water from the rancher.

The Express-News looked at data from the nonprofit Sky-Truth, which compiled reports from FracFocus, the national registry where oil and gas operators report the chemicals and water used in every well hydraulically fractured in the U.S.

The data is not perfect. It’s likely incomplete, and there’s a lag between the time when a well is fractured and when the data gets reported.

However, it’s the best set of publicly available information about water use for hydraulic fracturing, and gives some insight into the shale drilling boom. (Because of changes to the FracFocus website, Sky-Truth has not been able to scrape data since May.) No state agency tallies the well-by-well amount of water used in oil and gas operations.

The UT paper noted the Eagle Ford was a particularly difficult field to predict, and its lead author, Jean-Philippe Nicot, a research scientist at UT’s Bureau of Economic Geology, said he now thinks the actual use in the Eagle Ford is around 40,000 acre-feet annually.

He’s working on a paper that will be peer-reviewed and looks specifically at South Texas, but said the proximity to Gulf Coast refineries and oil prices staying near $100 a barrel have accelerated the field’s development.

It’s barely five years from discovery, but the Eagle Ford is expected to cross the 1 million-barrel-per-day mark for crude oil production sometime next year.

Three Eagle Ford counties — Karnes, La Salle and Gonzales — are the top crude oil producers in Texas. And the jobs and wealth added to the region have been unprecedented, even for a region already familiar with the booms-and-bust cycle of oil and gas.

Private property rights, economics on an overwhelming magnitude, regulatory issues, drought and complex geologic variation across a large aquifer are among the many issues tangled up in South Texas water use, along with the competition between agriculture, communities and industry.

Geologist Darrell Brownlow, a resident of Wilson County who has a ranch in La Salle County with both oil and water wells, said there’s a trade-off at work.

“There’s probably not a more complex situation,” Brownlow said. “It’s not something that’s easily solved. Ten years ago, you could have bought all the land you wanted in South Texas. It wasn’t worth anything.” Few made enough cattle ranching or through deer hunts to even pay property taxes. Now there’s less water, but much of the land can’t be bought at any price.

“If somebody were to say, ‘Look, you can have 10 oil wells on your property and in trade it will lower your water table by 50 feet,’ what would you say?”

In the Winter Garden region, dozens of artesian springs once flowed and inspired lush community names such as Artesia Wells, Carrizo Springs and Big Wells.

Those springs stopped flowing decades ago. Agriculture has been pumping the Carrizo Wilcox Aquifer for 100 years now, pulling more water out than gets replaced by rainfall.

Now add a drought and an unprecedented oil-drilling boom.

Fitzsimons said the problems date to the early 1900s, when land promoters sold the dream of an oasis in the desert. Warm temperatures and iron-rich sandy orange soil made Dimmit, La Salle and Zavala counties, which make up the water conservation district, as well as some other surrounding counties, a top spot for growing fruits and vegetables. A land boom was on in an area once known as the despoblado, no man’s land.

“As a resource, water was used with little regard to conservation or even the slightest regard for future needs,” Fitzsimons said.

By 1930, the water table had dropped 150 feet.

Paul Bertetti and Ron Green, scientists with San Antonio’s Southwest Research Institute, said fracturing is taking as much as half of the available recharge to the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer in the Wintergarden district, and is as much as 20 percent of total water use.

“That’s essentially the only source of water for those counties. The Carrizo-Wilcox is under stress,” Bertetti said. “It’s not recharging. Why is that? Recharge is dependent on precipitation, and this area doesn’t get a lot of rainfall.”

The Carrizo-Wilcox, where the Carrizo Sandstone meets the Wilcox Group, stretches from southwest to northeast Texas. As the depth and geology varies, so does the water quality, and in some areas it’s more brackish than fresh.

To the east, where average rainfall increases dramatically, the Carrizo-Wilcox generally is more prolific, recharges more easily and there are more aquifers that provide drinking water.

But in the Wintergarden district, it’s the primary and best water source.

It’s not like the limestone Edwards Aquifer in San Antonio, which rises nearly as soon as it rains. Water can move a mile a day through the Edwards. In the tight sandstone, it moves feet per year, recharging slowly.

Fracturing in the Winter Garden counties also takes more water than the Eagle Ford as a whole — an average of about 5.6 million gallons per well this year, up from 5.5 million gallons last year, according to the newspaper’s analysis.

Last year, companies reported using 16,778 acre-feet in 1,003 wells in the three counties.

The Texas Water Development Board’s monitoring well in La Salle County last week showed water in the Carrizo-Wilcox aquifer at 496 feet below the surface, a drop of 247 feet from where it was 10 years ago.

“Water is like a piece of gold here, and it will continue to be,” Cotulla City Administrator Larry Dovalina said at a recent Eagle Ford event. “At some point in time, we will look for water transfers from another region.”

The city of Cotulla has invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in its wells in the past three years to make sure the dropping water levels don’t ruin its pumps. “If you start sucking air through your pumps, your pumps start to burn,” Dovalina said.

Brownlow said the region has been hit by three things: increased pumping for fracturing, increased pumping by the agricultural community because of drought and reduced rainwater recharge.